Abstract

Long-duration living and working in microgravity creates everyday mobility problems such as drifting, loss of stable footing, higher effort to move, and difficulty doing routine tasks safely. Many solutions have been proposed in literature, including handrails, restraint systems, and concepts for artificial gravity using rotation. Artificial gravity could improve comfort, but it is complex to build and operate for large spacecraft, especially when future missions may include not only trained astronauts but also common people. With companies like SpaceX pushing toward large-scale travel and long-term settlement goals, there is a need for simpler mobility support technologies that can work inside spacecraft without requiring a rotating habitat [34], [35]. This thesis investigates a modular “intelligent floor” approach that enables controlled foothold and soft release without rotating the vehicle. The proposed system is divided into three cooperating subsystems: System 1 is a scalable electromagnetic floor tile that integrates a 6×6 array of electromagnets inside a structural aluminum tile and uses an underside electronics layer (driver PCB + cooling fan) for coil actuation and sensing; System 2 is a shoe-mounted sensing and telemetry node that provides real-time shoe attitude and floor-clearance cues using a BNO08x IMU and a downward-facing VL53L0X time-of-flight sensor, streamed over Wi-Fi/UDP at ~20 Hz; and System 3 is a central computer that fuses shoe telemetry with vision-based foot localization to determine which coils to energize and when to apply smooth current ramps for natural-feeling engagement and release. The system supports a smooth release behavior during walking by adjusting magnet activation timing and strength based on gait information. The user can also tune settings such as maximum “stickiness” and release timing so the walking feel can be personalized [43] [44] for different body weights and preferences. RFID tags on the shoes provide user identification, allowing the controller to apply the correct profile and improve reliability when multiple users are present. For vision-based localization, different pose and tracking approaches are considered (such as landmark-based and detectorbased models), and the controller uses confidence and redundancy to avoid unsafe behavior when tracking quality drops. The thesis also presents a complete engineering workflow including mechanical tile design, electronics integration, firmware and UDP communication, calibration methods, and simulation-based evaluation of power and thermal constraints. Results demonstrate the feasibility of localized magnet activation under the foot region and coordinated control across the three subsystems. Finally, this work outlines future research directions, including extending the sensing approach by using RFID RSSI or UWB Time-Difference-of-Arrival (TDoA) [53, 54, 56, 67]as an additional fused signal for proximity and orientation estimation, which is a novel direction that can improve robustness as the system scales to larger floors and more users.

Date of publication

Spring 2-27-2026

Document Type

Thesis

Language

english

Persistent identifier

http://hdl.handle.net/10950/5071

Committee members

Dr. Prabha Sundaravadivel, Dr. Premananda Indic, Dr. Ali Ghorshi

Degree

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Download

Share

COinS